Big yellow taxi

The coronavirus pandemic presents profound ironies for urbanists, as urban form finds itself playing a leading role in “what’s to become of our cities?” conjecture. At the epicenter is the topic of density: is too much harmful because we can’t distance ourselves? Or is too little harmful because it lessens access to facilities like health clinics? There are renewed debates about service inequity (what neighborhoods have adequate public space? And essential services like grocery stores?). And environmental racism has been glaringly exposed—chronic exposure to polluted air leads to more severe respiratory illness, putting people at risk for complications from COVID-19. Why have we allowed housing next to highways and power plants, and why is this housing predominantly occupied by people of color?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “social distancing” as it relates to good urban form. Social distancing is especially paradoxical for urbanists because it comes up against a long-held urbanist principle: that urban social diversity and the inter-mixing that occurs is something to cultivate, not flatten. How are we supposed to think about the goal of neighborhood-based social mixing at a time when we are being told to stay in our household bubbles, stick with our own social group, and avoid “others”?

A century ago, the sociologist Robert Park wrote about the phenomenon of “social distance.” What he was referring to was that people in diverse, dense cities tend to find non-spatial ways of keeping their distance. Proximity alone, in other words, does not achieve a meaningful type of social integration. In an ironic twist of phrase, social distancing in pandemic-speak has come to mean the opposite: social distancing in otherwise dense, diverse settings is not about social morays and staying aloof and being unfriendly, but about actual, physical distancing. This is a dynamic that is the near inverse of what Robert Park was writing about.

Let me offer an optimistic view of what this might mean for urbanism in the future. My hope is that, in the long run, forced physical distancing will mean that urban residents will acquire a more acute sense of their local surroundings—their neighbors and their neighborhoods. This will be both a gradual and a dramatic change, since for at least the past 50 years the neighborhood has tended to be very loosely understood. The neighborhood idea has been obscured because we can obtain services and goods anywhere, have fluid, non-proximal social contacts, and perceive our local environment as being complex and geographically broad. Everything a localized social grouping might have been based on seems to have long-lost relevance: extended families living in the same locale, face-to-face communication as the main form of social connection, the close integration of work and residence, daily shopping at the corner market.

But—and here is the potential silver lining—as we are now forced to double-down on internet-based social connection—on top of physical distancing—I think this might force many of us to start appreciating what a localized sense of place and a physically enabled form of social connection actually means in our lives. Before, we had the luxury of virtual social connection, augmented with a completely optional form of social interaction (on the street or at the local shop) when we happened to be in the right mood. With third-place social interaction severely constrained or even taken away, we might develop a renewed sense of its importance. In other words, if those interactions are taken away from us by force, might we learn to appreciate them acutely, in the spirit of “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone?” ¹

A different but related outcome is being postulated for urban retail. As more and more people continue to work from home, the theory goes, main streets will be increasingly relied upon to service home workers throughout the day. A closer integration between workspace and the public realm—“pop-up offices, meeting pods, and technology centers linked to town squares”—will motivate more investment in public space (Woods, 2020). The rise of neighborhood-based co-working will stimulate main street retail, especially for businesses that had already been integrating online delivery and storefront operations. There will be an emphasis on localizing and staying away from everything “big” (e.g., large workplaces like office towers), which is likely to be good for main streets. Shopping and working on a retail street might start to feel like “an act of civic engagement” (Wilson, 2018).

In the U.S., we have a long tradition of idealizing local attachment. Many Americans would say that caring about the places around us—streets and sidewalks, parks and schools, shopkeepers, and institutions—is the very root of democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America chronicled this American spirit—the importance of local place, participation, and the uniquely American ethos of active commitment to it.

And yet this localized existence has always seemed just out of reach. We seem to lack the right apparatus for its effectuation. The local place/local participation root of American democracy has instead swirled around in our psyche as an untethered, idealized, and impractical notion. Elsewhere (Talen, 2018) I have wondered whether the effectuation piece that is missing is a concrete sense of neighborhood, a way of bringing together ideals about place, participation and social connection and anchoring them to the land. Now I’m wondering if COVID-19 is handing us the motivational spark that was needed.

I am not the first to recognize that the pandemic is energizing “collective infrastructure.” ² What I am hoping is that a more potent force will emerge—a widespread constituency that will come to see the value of the place-based neighborhood as a tool of community activism and empowerment. The situation pre-pandemic was that a handful of dedicated individuals carried the neighborhood activation load. Could the pandemic have the effect of broadening and deepening commitments and caring? Could it ultimately be the antidote to complacency?

Urbanists with an urban design bent often argue that the form and design of the neighborhood, if it adheres to certain principles, promotes neighborhood identity and potentially, civic identity and spirit. And by the same token, a physically deteriorated neighborhood or a widely dispersed neighborhood works against neighborhood and civic identity. Rather than treating the neighborhood like a convenient geographic locator, or, as Jane Jacobs lamented, a “valentine,” we need to become more invested in neighborhood spaces, places, built forms—and neighbors. When we emerge on the other side of the pandemic, will we retreat once again to neighborhood irrelevance and obscurity, or will we orient ourselves in locally place-based ways to combat isolation and exclusion, and promote empowerment and connection within and without?

Along with the importance of good neighborhood design principles, it will be necessary to develop better skills of self-governance—the ability of residents to come together to form a collective response. Biologist David Sloan Wilson (2011) has elevated this to a science. He stresses the power of events—a neighborhood gathering, a contest to renovate a vacant lot, or any number of opportunities for “collective action”—all “richly informed” by scientific principles about self-management and spontaneous social control. When social distancing is finally lifted, let’s be ready to act on whatever pent-up demand for collective action that might now be taking root under our imposed, stay-at-home isolation.

When all is said and done, when we are back to urban life as usual, maybe we will have learned to care more deeply about collective, neighborhood-based action, to value our neighbors and to value our public spaces. Or at least, maybe we will come to be less interested in “social distance” in the Robert Park sense of the term.